Oh, well hello there. You are still there aren’t you? I’m impressed. I haven’t been very good to you, have I? I’m sorry. I guess you are probably wondering where the heck I have wondered off to. Well the answer is Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
What?
Okay here it goes. Phew.
Well my graduate position lost its funding and about two weeks before classes were scheduled to start, I found out that I will not be attending Frostburg. Well, damn. Now what? Megan and I drove back to Maryland, stopping overnight in Wisconsin to visit my “big sister” Abby again and after 28 hours spent drive across the country in Rick, we made it home. I spent the next two days helping the family out at the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair and got to watch my nephew show his pigs as his first year as a 4-Her, that was very exciting for me! He did a very good job too! 🙂
Isn’t he the cutest thing?
And then I packed a small bag, commandeered my dad’s Prius (aka Turd on Wheels), and drove 18 hours southwest to Missouri. Why? Because I am an awesome and loving girlfriend. My boyfriend, J, has been at Fort Leonard Wood for MP BOLC (yay Army acronyms, this one means military police basic officer leader course), which is a five month long training for officers, he has been here since early July and is graduating in 2 ½ weeks. The original plan was to come visit him for a few days and then head off to my new life as a graduate student. Well as life goes, plans change. I ended up absolutely loving Missouri. Yes, yes, I know it’s Missouri (pronounced misery), but have you ever been here? It’s beautiful! So many trees and rock faces, cliffs, caves… Yeah, you’re thinking I must just be sooooo tree deprived from North Dakota. Maybe that’s true. But whatever it is, I enjoy it here at lot. So I ended up deciding to stay here until J graduates in November.
That’s him. J and I at the MP ball 🙂
“Didn’t your last post say something about running Tough Mudder in Maryland?” Oh good, you’re keeping up! Yes, well I drove back to Maryland in September; I mean, my dad kinda did need his car back since I had stolen it from him. I was all stoked to run in Tough Mudder, my buddies from Pittsburgh came down to run with me, we cook an awesome high protein, pre-race dinner of Red Pepper Glazed Salmon over whole wheat pasta (recipe can be found here –http://allrecipes.com/recipe/red-pepper-salmon-pasta/ absolutely delicious I might add), and even managed to go to bed early. We were scheduled to run the Sunday race and had been keeping up-to-date the event’s Facebook page. They were having major issues with traffic from the Saturday event blocking up the entire city of Frederick, not to mention a very intense storm came through causing them to shut down the course for the afternoon. All seemed good to go for Sunday when we went to bed, that had even posted photos from the runners that ran on Saturday and that just pumped us up even more!! We had planned to try and beat traffic by waking up at 4am and heading out as soon as we wiped the sleep from our eyes. Guess what? Shit happens. Yep, we received text messages around 1:30am from Tough Mudder saying they completely cancelled the event for Sunday.
WTF. Grumble. Not postponed. Cancelled. Awesome. (See it’s over a month later and I am still getting mad about this). You have to understand “the toughest event on the planet,” a 10 mile insane obstacle course takes a lot of training and prep to get ready for it. I had been training for MONTHS. And the next event that I can run? NEXT YEAR…
Glass half full, glass half full… breath. Okay thinking positive, I now have a full year to train for the event. This means I can try to run in the top 5% and be eligible for The World’s Toughest Mudder. I am always up for a challenge. Why not?
Yeah, I realize I am composing a novel for one blog entry. Well you wanted to know what happened to me. And I am skipping over many details, so this is the brief of the past few months. If you’re still there reading then keep on going… I’m almost to today.
I spent the rest of my time in the east with some good friends in Pittsburgh. Alex, Jacobi, and I had a girls night out in downtown Pittsburgh and that ended up turning into a story of its own. (Trying to keep it brief..) We ended up meeting and hanging out with Sydney Crosby, James Neal, and a few of the other Pittsburgh Penguins (hockey players for those of you who are sports illiterate). Yeah that was a fun night, and if requested I can go into detail and tell y’all about it, but if not then I won’t bore you with the details. Just know –IT WAS AWESOME!
Boom. Today. It is October 23, 2012. In case you did not know.
Holy cow – that was loud. So one of the things about living on an Army instillation is you get to hear lots of fun booms, for example somewhere on post they are currently exploding something. Its loud and it shakes the entire apartment complex. Crazy. But I love it. That and the bugle horns that play at 6:30am, noon, 5:00pm, and 9:00pm. It’s all pretty cool to experience. I have been occupying my time here in various ways while J is away at class. Margo (my new BFF here, a marine in J’s class’ wife) and I have picked up some new hobbies. We have learned how to make survival strap bracelets, crochet – I started a scarf… and it’s somewhere, half finished, and have indulged in the “house wife” activities of laundry, cooking, cleaning. Yeah if you know me you might have to go pick up your jaw from the ground now. I’ll wait.
You okay now? I know I know. It’s not my usual character, but I am still here, I go hiking and running when it’s nice out. I told you Missouri is beautiful, there is a cave on post that is absolutely STUNNING and I love hiking down to it. There’s this running trail called the engineer trail which is 2 ¾ miles of straight HELL. Yeah I can run 8miles straight no problem. Add in massive hills, points where you stop and perform various tasks such as pull-ups, sit-ups, parallel bars, etc, and it becomes enough to kick anyone’s ass thoroughly. Also they offer spouse classes (no, I am not married, but they still accept me anyways) such as FRG (Family Readiness Group) leadership courses, military etiquette classes, etc. So I have been keeping busy. And when I am not doing all that, there’s always Pinterest. I saw that eye roll. Yes, I am addicted to it.
So what does that mean for this blog? I have no idea, honestly. Only time will tell. I could just change it into just a life blog and tell you about my days, if you are even interested in that. Or I could post fun recipes that I like to cook. Hmm.. there are a lot of those already. I don’t know. We’ll just wait and see what happens.
You excited? …. Maybe?
Red Maple (Acer rubrum)
adventureiswild.com 
Well, if you two do tie the not, I think you’ll make a good wife. You already have the cooking down pretty good, and that’s only half of what a man needs. The other… Well, we both know what that is. LOL!